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United pilots: Share rewards now

Joanne Kelley, Rocky Mountain News

Published August 7, 2007 at midnight

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United Airlines pilots have a message for company executives: Workers shouldn't have to wait until their current contracts expire to share in the company's recent success.

Irking employees the most: UAL CEO Glenn Tilton's 2006 compensation package worth $40 million. Pilots and other employees still work under the contracts they renegotiated to help keep the carrier afloat.

"The executives are clearly rewarding themselves," said United pilot Walter Rossi, who picketed with colleagues Monday at Denver International Airport to protest the big payouts to top executives since the company emerged from bankruptcy. "We'd like to share in that."

The pilots agreed to two rounds of pay and benefit cuts, giving back about 40 percent of their pay. They also lost their defined-benefit pensions.

The salaries of pilots were slashed by between $40,000 and $110,000 a year, depending on seniority, according to their union. The number of pilots also has dropped by more than 50 percent since 2003.

On the sidewalk next to United's passenger drop-off area at DIA, pilots and some flight attendants walked with placards, some of which read, "Management feeds from the trough, Labor gets the scraps."

Pilots also distributed leaflets to passengers.

"The people who've come up to us today have been very supportive," said Steve Dereby, communications chairman of the Air Line Pilots Association.

A United spokeswoman provided a written statement that said the company regularly talks with its unions.

"We have an excellent future ahead of us - with our greatly improved performance, as evidenced by our second-quarter results last week," the statement said.

The company also said it is hiring pilots and has received more than 1,100 applications in the first two weeks.

At issue

• United Airlines pilots take issue with the company's move to reward top executives while employees still work under contracts that reduced their pay to help the carrier through its bankruptcy woes.

30 percent of pilots' pay was given back to United in 2003, and another 11.8 percent of their wages were forfeited in 2005. Other benefits, including pensions, also were eliminated or slashed.